@EricWHickman@StephanieKelton The average defecit over the years has been closer to 4% of GDP. If debt service is now 3% of GDP and going higher with rate hikes, it does juice up the deficit (all else equal) and therefore provide additional fiscal stimulus.
Pensions are fundamentally a future production problem, not a financial one. Private pensions accumulate financial assets, while State Pensions create rule-based entitlements to future payments. Neither stores the goods and services that pensioners will consume in 35 years’ time.
Those financial claims and entitlements will ultimately be exercised against the output being produced then. If future productive capacity is insufficient relative to the purchasing power seeking to command it, the result is competition for scarce real resources and potentially higher prices.
The solution is therefore to increase the economy’s future productive capacity through investment today, not simply to reduce future pension payments. Cutting nominal claims today does not create the required additional goods and services tomorrow. Worse, if spending cuts reduce investment, skills, infrastructure or productive capacity today, they will leave both workers and pensioners poorer in real terms tomorrow.
The banana in your kitchen is a sterile mutant that can't reproduce. Every single one is a clone, and nearly the entire global export supply traces back to one plant raised in an English greenhouse in the 1830s.
Wild bananas are stuffed with hard seeds the size of peppercorns. Barely any flesh. Around 7,000 years ago, farmers in New Guinea stumbled on rare mutants carrying three sets of chromosomes instead of two. An odd number can't split evenly during reproduction, so seed-making fails and the plant pours everything into flesh. Those tiny black specks in the middle of your banana are the remains of seeds that never developed.
Perfect fruit, one catch. No seeds means no planting. Growing another one requires cutting a shoot off the base and sticking it in the ground.
A clone.
Back in the 1830s, the Duke of Devonshire's gardener raised one of these plants at Chatsworth House. His family name was Cavendish. Cuttings descended from that greenhouse now make up 99% of bananas exported on Earth, genetically identical from Ecuador to the Philippines.
Identical genes means a fungus that kills one plant kills all of them. And it already happened. Gros Michel, the banana everyone ate before 1960, was wiped out commercially by a soil fungus called Panama disease. The industry quietly swapped in the Cavendish, a lookalike that resisted it, and most shoppers never noticed their banana had been replaced.
A new strain called TR4 kills Cavendish too. No cure exists, the spores survive in soil for decades, and it has spread to more than 20 countries. Late 2025 it reached Ecuador, the world's biggest exporter.
The world already lost its banana once and got handed a body double. The body double is dying the same way.
In 2000, Jason Colacino and Katie Boyle danced the Honky Tonk like nobody before or since.
Jason passed away in 2009. He was only 31.
A half a billion plays across all platforms, give or take.
Sometimes we get so busy we forget. This is my touchstone for how good we can be.
@NickTimiraos@EconDerek I don't disagree. Although, all he is doing is changing the maturity (duration) of the issuance which the Treasury itself sets. He should know that…
There's an open-source AI tool 'Siftly' that can solve this problem
2.5K Stars, it can really find those messily saved tools and articles
Import bookmarks → AI reads full text and screenshot text → automatic summary and categorization → natural language search + mind map browsing
Runs locally, no cloud upload, supports exporting CSV/JSON/ZIP. Using Claude saves you the API key hassle
Project address::
https://t.co/R0Dqgv5PpS
The thing I've never understood is why would an undocumented immigrant or non-citizen want to risk being arrested and deported by voting illegally? The answer is, they don't, and that's why they don't try to vote.
Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire make this tap dancing routine in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) look effortless. Every step is perfectly timed, every turn flows naturally, and neither dancer ever seems to be chasing the music. Their movement feels so smooth that it’s easy to forget just how difficult this level of precision really is.
It wasn’t just their technical ability. They trusted each other completely, creating a connection that made every routine feel natural, elegant, and unforgettable.
«No todo lo que realmente importa se puede ver con los ojos.
A veces, sólo cuando la vista enmudece, la imaginación, la memoria y la intuición comienzan a hablar.»
📹 ✍🏼: Por el escultor polaco Michał Kulig
It’s not “Socialism” it’s common sense.
According to the 2026 Index of Economic Freedom, there are 27 countries that are truly and fully capitalist.
Every single one has universal healthcare, 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐔𝐬.
Every single one has paid parental leave. 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐔𝐬.
Every single country has unionization rates above 10%. 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐔𝐬.
Every single country has job protection laws. 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐔𝐬.
Every single country has mandatory employer provided PTO. 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭 𝐔𝐬.
We have the lowest literacy rate of all the developed Capitalist countries.
We have the lowest life expectancy of all developed Capitalist countries.
And then came exile. When the Israelites were carried off to Babylon in the 6th century BCE, they encountered something remarkable: Zoroastrianism, the Persian faith built around a cosmic struggle between a supreme god of light and the forces of darkness. Angels, demons, the apocalypse, the Last Judgement — ideas that would transform Judaism, and through it Christianity and Islam, may have entered the tradition not from Sinai but from Persia.
https://t.co/CvBe7Mbf1y
The Theoretical Minimum Series
By Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman
“A number of years ago I became aware of the large number of physics enthusiasts out there who have no venue to learn modern physics and cosmology. Fat advanced textbooks are not suitable to people who have no teacher to ask questions of, and the popular literature does not go deeply enough to satisfy these curious people. So I started a series of courses on modern physics at Stanford University where I am a professor of physics. The courses are specifically aimed at people who know, or once knew, a bit of algebra and calculus, but are more or less beginners.”
— Leonard Susskind